Session

Practical Considerations for Domain Specific Languages in Ruby

Ruby is a powerful platform for writing Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), as evidenced by the popularity and power of tools like Ruby on Rails and Rake. However, writing effective DSLs is difficult. This session provides practical considerations for writing your own DSLs in Ruby. Ford discusses the spectrum of language types, from simple declarative additions to Ruby libraries (in the style of ActiveRecord) to sentence structure DSLs all the way to pre-processed DSLs, along with testing, abstraction, and maintainability. This talk is essential for developers wanting to take full advantage of this important paradigm shift.